Sound Blaster Live! value problem in XP...

So this old card has been running fine, then one day I reboot my computer and I've got no sound (yesterday it was). So I go to my audiohq in control panel and it says I need to reinstall drivers. So I do and I restart... says I need to reinstall again. So I decided to completely remove drivers first this time. So I uninstall drivers reboot then try to reinstall and it says that no soundblaster hardware could be detected. I'm 90% sure the card is still in place and short of a crazy coincidence that it just died at that exact moment I think it is still fine. I have searched googled and found several similar situations but no solution.

Any suggestions?

I'd prefer to deal with software as my case is ugly and dusty but I can get my hands dirty if need be. I don't want to keep pumping money into this box because I think the hard drive will be the next to go. It's a 5 year old Maxtor 120GB. So I'm going to buy a notebook computer soon. Probably a macbook. Macbook or Toshiba Satelite? (got a pretty good student deal on toshiba)

Thanks for your help guys.

i have a audigy i recommend the following uninstall the drivers remove the soudcard reboot reinstall soudcard goto creative website and follow instructions reboot after each install and install in correct order (u must do this for it to work and i dont recommend installing the player software.

Hey, Tristan, may i ask?

Do you actually still have the card? Is that a CREATIVE SB LIVE CARD from 6 years ago? I am having the same problem and decided to ignored it completely because I dont have the pure solutions. I still love my card.

Previously I was using 98 and ME and card was find. The installer works and the players as well as the featured programs are easily installed. But not in the case of XP. For XP i needed to use the latest driver and not the original installer doesn't worked well. Yes it does detect the card but seems like the software isn't working on XP.

While i was using it on XP, I had the exact problem like yours. Worst was when i was playing winamp or whatever, the sound stops and well the 'driver' error came out. Of course i had the same problem: no hardware detected. Even the driver were.... seems missing. I even tried SYSTEM RESTORE. Same problem. I had to remove the card, put it back, restart. Reinstalled the 'missing' driver. It went OK but after a few weeks or so, it came back...

What could be the problem? The card? The software? I don't know. I stopped using it then. I have been using onboard AC97 sound... I know it sucks. I missed the sound quality of creative. So i am saving up for the latest AUDIGY series. Seems like all the soundcards from CREATIVE are AUDIGY series. However I missed my LIVE VALUE, it does work well on my win 98 based platform but not on a win XP platform.